Ruckel, now 32, was one of the children saved by Upton. He lived — if that’s the right word for the excruciating existence he was condemned to by the communist regime’s population growth policy — in the “Institute for the Unsalvageables,” an orphanage in northern Romania where hundreds of handicapped children suffered gut-wrenching abuses.

Upton, 56, was found dead Thursday near his Olivenhain home. His neighbor, Michael Vilkin, 61, who was arrested shortly after, said he acted in self-defense. A dispute between the men may have involved landscaping.

In 1990, Upton, then a filmmaker in his early 30s, traveled to Romania with a mission: Save the orphans. Romania in the early 1990s was reeling after the collapse of the regime of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the husband and wife dictators known for their sadistic brutality. Contraception and abortion were forbidden, and poverty and food rationing made it nearly impossible to meet the robust demands of the state: procreate or pay a “celibacy tax.” As a result, an estimated 100,000 children were sent to state-run institutions.

Upton was moved by a “20/20” documentary that aired shortly after the country’s 1989 revolution that exposed the orphanage’s atrocities. One girl’s leg was broken at the knee and grotesquely twisted. The children were severely neglected and malnourished, their heads shaved to prevent lice infestations. But there were glimpses of humanity amid the desecration — a young girl singing a beautiful song.

Instead of throwing his arms up in despair, Upton acted.

“I regard him as a trailblazer,” said Eli Brooks, who adopted the first child Upton brought to San Diego in 1990. “John is famous for taking action. That was what he did.”

Upton brought Ruckel and dozens of other children to the states, where many were adopted by loving families in San Diego and around the country.

Rescuing even one orphan from that bureaucratic thicket was an accomplishment, but to inspire powerful and influential people — among them billionaire philanthropist Richard Branson, actress Jessica Lange and U.S. lawmakers — to care about the plight of these innocent children was an achievement on a different scale. More than 5,000 orphans were rescued from Romania.

In the days after Upton’s shooting, the children he crusaded for and their adoptive families remembered him. In the past 20 years, these children have grown up.

Here are two of their stories.

Unsalvageable? Unthinkable

Anna Ostos captured Upton’s heart when he visited her orphanage in northeastern Romania in 1990. She was the little girl in the “20/20” documentary with the voice of gold.

She was the first child he brought to the U.S.

Anna, then 15, was a specter of a girl — blind, too weak to walk more than a few steps, and uncommunicative after years of neglect in the Institute for the Unsalvageables, the orphanage where she was abandoned.

Upton gently nurtured Anna back toward health, and soon he marveled at her progress. “Who would have thought in November she would be getting on a bus and going to school?” he told this newspaper, a few months after she moved to the U.S., in 1991.

Anna is 37 now, thriving at home in Michigan with her parents, Eli and David Brooks. In a recent family photo, Anna flashes a smile in front of a decked-out Christmas tree, next to her parents and two sisters.

Due to the abuse she faced in the orphanage, she has some developmental issues and trouble communicating, her mother Eli Brooks, said — but that hasn’t stopped her from becoming the family comedian. “She’s got an amazing sense of humor. She’s her own unique person. She’s done very well with us,” Brooks said from Michigan. Anna “learned English in the bat of an eye — I can’t believe how fast that girl learned English.”

The Brookses don’t speak Romanian, not out of lack of interest, but because Anna refused to teach it to her family for a simple reason: Everyone had to speak English in America.

What Brooks will remember most about Upton: “He was a strong advocate for the kids, and he had tremendous passion and determination to get them out. That’s one of the things that struck us the most. He just had to get them out,” she said.

Brooks added that beyond taking action, he was an advocate for causes he believed in, and that is how his impact grew. “He never missed an opportunity to spread the word, not just about Romanians but other things he was involved in.”

Upton was an outspoken abortion opponent and made waves with his documentary footage of an actual abortion, using a fiber optic camera to show the procedure. He traveled around Europe with singer Pat Boone to promote one of his anti-abortion films, which premiered at the White House.

In 1987, he filmed a project about family violence for the Justice Department, and had former pro football player Lyle Alzado play a criminal who beats him up.

Brooks was struggling Friday with how to break the news of Upton’s death to her daughter. “This is going to be hard for her. … Anna loves John.”

“We will love him forever,” she added.

High fives, new lives

Izidor Ruckel remembers. He remembers the orphanage doctors, who wrote him off as “dimwitted.”

Now Izidor wants to make sure others heal — by remembering. A few years ago, he wrote a book about his experiences, called “Abandoned for Life.” “My goal was to let people who went through what I went through know that there is hope in this world. Help does eventually come your way. Just hold onto that hope that someone’s going to hear your voice and someone’s going to find you.”

That someone was Upton.

He remembers early meetings with Upton. “He used to come by there every day. He’d play, hang out with us, talk to us, give us high fives,” Ruckel said.

He remembers the day he was chosen. “He had to pick out kids that were going to be selected to be going to America.” Ruckel said the children were aching with excitement: “Am I going to go? Am I going to be called out?” When Izidor’s name was called, that was the first day of his new life. A short while after, in October 1991, he moved to America, where he was eventually adopted by the Ruckel family and settled in Rancho Peñasquitos. He grew stronger and showed everyone around him what fools those doctors were.

After he got to the states, he insisted that Upton rescue his friends, too. “I always told him, ‘Can you get this kid out? Can you get this kid out?’ And he always did.”

Some people have criticized Upton for having the wrong motives — money, notoriety.

Ruckel, who now lives in Colorado, wants to set the record straight: “One thing I want people to know is that he was a good man. … If anybody were in his shoes, anyone would have done what he did: try to save as many lives as he could and try to give them all a family and a home.”

Ruckel encourages people who’ve been through traumatic experiences to find ways to inspire others. Now he is following in Upton’s footsteps, working on a documentary about Romanian orphans, together with another orphan, Alex King. The movie is called “Given Our Chance.”

They never got to interview Upton, but it will feature an even stronger testament to his legacy: voices of those orphans, thriving today.